I had said that with the first season of Star Trek: Discovery, they didn’t fail so much in execution as in full-bore pursuing a direction that just happened to be the wrong one. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe it’s the execution that’s off.
This was clear to me in the first episode of the current (and last) season of Discovery, which starts out in slamming Space Pulp fashion with Captain Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) in a space suit literally riding the outside of a starship while attempting to disable its engines to prevent criminals from getting away with a top-secret artifact. But then the scene cuts to flashback at a Starfleet celebration party and spends a bit too long on exposition before getting right back to where it was. Better direction – from say, Jonathan Frakes – or better scriptwriting could have created tension or irony by going back and forth between the two events, but this is an example of how Discovery kills momentum even when it is able to create it.
The incident stems from a double-secret “Red Directive” from the mysterious Dr. Kovich (David Cronenberg), which apparently justifies going against all Federation protocols. Burnham naturally doesn’t like this, and has her team investigate what little they’re allowed to know. In the meantime the pursuit is hampered because the criminals have endangered civilians while escaping, and Burnham directs Discovery to stop and clean up the mess because after all, the Federation are supposed to be the good guys. (As opposed to certain other ‘good guy’ nations of the real world that I will not name here.)
Eventually Burnham gets Kovich to reveal the purpose of their mission: The couriers Moll and L’ak (Eve Harlow and Elias Toufexis) had gotten their hands on the diary of a Romulan scientist who was a bit actor in none other than “The Chase” episode of the last season of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Picard picked up the lead of his late archaeology professor and, pursued by Klingon, Cardassian and Romulan teams, managed to find a hologram from the “Progenitors” who were the ultimate reason why humaniform life is so common in the Star Trek galaxy, and who left their last message in hopes that their descendants could live in peace. And while at the time nothing ever came of it (I liked the reaction where the Klingon captain said ‘That’s IT??’), apparently this Romulan scientist was taking notes and managed to trace the secret of the Progenitors’ universe-creating technology. And obviously the Feds don’t want these two criminals to exploit the secret for themselves, much less sell it to someone really nasty. Whatever that secret is.
And while the story manages to bring back Tilly (Meg Wiseman) and Book (David Ajala), who turns out to have a family connection to Moll, the main guest star of this season so far seems to be Captain Rayner (veteran Canadian character actor Callum Keith Rennie) whose ship interferes with Discovery’s mission about as much as it helps it. Rayner is a combative jerk, and in this respect greatly reminds me of Ruon Tarka from Season 4, except that Rennie has enough charisma to make it work. Not only that, Rayner seems to be more moral and self-aware than Tarka.
So at the same time that Rayner is pressured to give up his command because his rash actions led to the aforementioned endangering of civilians, Captain Saru (Doug Jones) decides to join the diplomatic core and marry T’rina of Ni’Var, so before leaving Discovery he tells Burnham to find a replacement Number One who is just as much of a “force” as she is. So she gets Admiral Vance to let her pick Rayner. Precisely because he’s not going to be a yes-man, and also to honor Saru, who took a chance on her as an officer after she’d been that much more insubordinate.
All well and good, but just as the issue with Season 4 was that they took the premise of Star Trek: The Motion Picture and stretched it over thirteen hours, the premise here seems to be revisiting “The Chase” and going from one episode to over 10. It’s not bad so far, but I’ve been seeing almost as many chances for this season to go wrong as it has to go right.